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We're using a pretty simple Exim configuration which basically forwards all incoming mail via a Smarthost to a handful of final recipients. Normally this works fine - we don't read any mail on the server itself, and the forwarding is very reliable. However, for 48 hours, due to a misconfiguration on the Smarthost, mail was being silently discarded by the Smarthost, and yet it was reporting to Exim that the mail was sent OK. So, all the Exim logs suggest success. Of course, now we've lost several dozen emails which turn out to be quite important :(.

I've asked our Smarthost provider if they can recover them, but as a plan B, I'm wondering how can I check if Exim still has copies in a queue / archive / sent folder somewhere. Given that we don't actually run mail clients on the server, I've done nothing beyond a simple dpkg-reconfigure exim4 to set up the Smarthost. From reading around, it seems like it's quite a bit of work to get Exim to keep copies, so I'm presuming we won't have anything. But I'd be interested to know how to check for sure - if indeed it's possible.

dsl101
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    If Exim got the reply that the mail was sent OK, it's extremely unlikely a copy remains on the server - this would have been to deliberately configured and won't happen by default or accident. If you use the default Debian/Ubuntu config, your chances are essentially zero. However, check the queue with `exim -bpc`. – Sven Mar 21 '15 at 17:30
  • Thanks for the command to check - as expected, it returned 0 :( – dsl101 Mar 24 '15 at 08:34

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Queued message are only held locally until the message has been successfully delivered. As the messages where successfully delivered to the smarthost, Exim should have purged the files from its queue. It is possible, but unlikely that some messages were not remove from the spool directory.

The Exim log should include the Sender, Recipient(s), and Subject of the messages. The logs will also contain the times the messages were received and delivered. It is unlikely to have kept much more of the message.

Exim can be configured to keep a copy of messages, but this is not default behavior.

User email clients usually keep a copy of sent messages. These messages may be on the individual user's computers. However, if you use IMAP, the messages may be on the system.

Applications may log the generation of the message, but usually do not log the full message. Depending on the application it may be possible to regenerate the message, although it may take some programming effort.

BillThor
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